Egalitarian Hedonism & The Working Class

Matt K. Lewis, who grew up white and working-class, reflects on the Tabitha Rouzzo story we talked about here last week. While he concedes that economic change plays a role in the demoralization of the white working class, insufficient attention is paid to how moral breakdown has contributed to their economic immiseration. Lewis cites a recent story in Vanity Fair quoting a veteran journalist’s recollection of covering Haight-Ashbury in the late Sixties, and seeing the descent of middle-class kids into hedonistic squalor. From the VF piece:

Some of the older reporters were not amused. Nicholas von Hoffman, of The Washington Post,who covered the Haight in a suit and tie, was, he says now, “appalled” by what he saw. It wasn’t that he didn’t like a lot of the people—he was fond of Joplin, for one—or wasn’t impressed by the numbers. In fact, this was, he says, “the same tactic that Gandhi used; he had 100 million people with no money, no guns, no nothing—these were his troops.” The Haight troops were, likewise, “this mass of young people who had no political knowledge, were not particularly well educated, but the thing you could get them to do was sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll,” and that bait, von Hoffman felt, was enough to achieve “enormously political” ends.

The overnight change in the attitude toward drugs was what alarmed von Hoffman. “A generation and a half before, you could back a dump truck full of cocaine into a Jesuit schoolyard and none of those boys would get near it.” Now, suddenly, he continues, “middle- and working-class kids were doing ‘vice tours,’ like American businessmen in Thailand: coming to the Haight for a few weeks, then, when the dirt between their toes got too encrusted, going home. This was when American blue-collar and middle-class kids became drug users. This was the beginning of the Rust Belt rusting.”

When two Russian diplomats requested a personal tour of the Haight, von Hoffman obliged them. (They ran into his son, who’d grown his hair and joined in the merriment.) Then von Hoffman persuaded Ben Bradlee, the Post’s managing editor, to come to San Francisco and see “all the shit that’s happening” for himself. By that time, recalls Stanley Mouse, “if a tour bus’s air-conditioning broke down, the tourists would be afraid to get out, even in 95-degree heat.” Von Hoffman ended Bradlee’s tour by taking him to a drug lab. “Then Ben flew back in a state of shock,” says von Hoffman, who, soon after, fled back east himself.

This, I suppose, is an argument for the “no guardrails” theory — a theory that basically says the rich and famous can afford to live a bacchanalian existence, while those who emulate them pay the price.

A lifestyle of addiction, promiscuity, and chaos comes with a hefty price tag. Sadly, our elites are exporting those values to the people least capable of sustaining them. If you don’t believe me, just watch MTV.

Aside from the money in their bank accounts, the spoiled kids featured on My Super Sweet Sixteen aren’t terribly different from those featured in the trailer for MTV’s upcoming reality series Buckwild. The difference, of course, is that the West Virginia kids being glamorized inBuckwild will grow old before their time — if they live long enough to grow old, that is. Most will likely spend the rest of their lives paying for the sins of their youth. The rich kids, on the other hand — well, they will likely land on their feet.

Hull’s column demonstrates how bad moral decisions impacted Tabitha Rouzzo’s family. For example, of Rouzzo’s mom, Hull writes: “In her face and spirit were traces of the cheerleader who got pregnant in the eighth grade… They had two daughters and Tabi on the way when they split.”

Rick Santorum has popularized the notion that being married before having kids — and then staying married — is good for the pocketbook. When we mock social conservatives for their “family values,” we ought to remember the practical reason these values caught on.

Many people hate to consider this, because they think it’s about holding the working class to a stricter, double standard. What these people fail to understand is the truth of Robert Heinlein’s maxim holding that civilizations have the morality they can afford. The working class in this country cannot afford to have the morality of suburban middle and upper-middle class libertines. Of course these libertines can’t, in a spiritual and emotional sense, afford this morality either (see “The Lost Children of Rockdale County” for documentary evidence of how blasted-out these well-off white kids are by this moral bankruptcy), and if they don’t recover, they’ll find themselves poor too. The point is that they have resources to recover, resources that the working class does not.

We Americans have become egalitarian in our hedonism, and are willing to believe any lies that tell us we can live exactly as we want to, without consequences.

Rick Santorum isn’t widely mocked for saying that getting and staying married is a good idea. That’s something everyone agrees on– see, e.g., “Barack Obama asks fathers to take responsibility” from 2008, or “Obama and Santorum Agree: America Needs Two-Parent Families” from 2011.

The data appears to suggest that teen pregnancy more generally follows from lack of economic opportunity, not the other way around. Kearney & Levine:

Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four times as likely as teens in Germany or Norway, and almost ten times as likely as teens in Switzerland. A teenage girl in Mississippi is four times more likely to give birth than a teenage girl in New Hampshire—and 15 times more likely to give birth as a teen compared to a teenage girl in Switzerland. We examine teen birth rates alongside pregnancy, abortion, and “shotgun” marriage rates as well as the antecedent behaviors of sexual activity and contraceptive use. We demonstrate that variation in income inequality across U.S. states and developed countries can explain a sizable share of the geographic variation in teen childbearing. Our reading of the totality of evidence leads us to conclude that being on a low economic trajectory in life leads many teenage girls to have children while they are young and unmarried. Teen childbearing is explained by the low economic trajectory but is not an additional cause of later difficulties in life. Surprisingly, teen birth itself does not appear to have much direct economic consequence. Our view is that teen childbearing is so high in the United States because of underlying social and economic problems. It reflects a decision among a set of girls to “drop-out” of the economic mainstream; they choose nonmarital motherhood at a young age instead of investing in their own economic progress because they feel they have little chance of advancement.

Just one study, not the word of God or anything. Lewis has definitely unearthed a striking anecdote, but it’s not evident how much it has to tell us about policy & society writ large.

Rod, I think you’re hitting on an important issue, and that is “how do we define social conservatism” and “how do we distinguish between classes as to who needs to embrace it?”

First I think “social conservatism” needs to better defined. If “social conservatism” means lamenting the decline of civility and good manners in our society, I think that’s something supportable. If social conservatism is saying “think about your future before you have a child you can’t support,” that’s fine too. But when social conservatism becomes an overarching philosophy of, “This is how it has always been, and it fits everyone, and how dare anybody deviate from it,” that’s when people (or at least I) get troubled by it.

coming to the Haight for a few weeks, then, when the dirt between their toes got too encrusted, going home. This was when American blue-collar and middle-class kids became drug users.

That sounds a lot like college, but it lasts for 4 years, not a few weeks, and the students get a middle class job and move to the suburbs after they finish.

Rick Santorum has popularized the notion that being married before having kids — and then staying married — is good for the pocketbook. When we mock social conservatives for their “family values,” we ought to remember the practical reason these values caught on.

No, Rick Santorum got mocked for comparing homosexuality to “man on dog” sex and for proudly declaring his opposition to birth control every chance he got.

I’m guessing that a lifestyle of “addiction, promiscuity, and chaos” doesn’t work very well for anyone regardless of income level (hence Rockdale County). The distinction is that better-off kids or young adults, who have real, visible reasons to defer gratification don’t go that far. They may party a bit, but are unlikely to become drug addicts or alcoholics. They may engage in hookups while in college, but do so while practicing safe sex and contraception. And very few descend into chaos. T the contrary, they tend to,get fairly good grades, attend well-regarded colleges, and graduate from those colleges. Within a few years of graduation, many forego promiscuity, get married, stay married, and raise kids. The problem with a number of working class young adults, and some wealthier kids, is that, lacking any reason to defer gratification, they skip the carefully modulated aspects of the lifestyle, which can lead to “addiction, promiscuity, and chaos.”

I actually wonder if the bad behavior shows of the working class by MTV are almost like the scared straight shows from generations ago. Since the beginning of the Lesser Depression teen pregancy has dropped a lot and I suspect the ‘success’ of Teen Mom made an impact.

Secondly, in its own way history is full of bad behavior. Pop culture has always celebrated bad behavior of the rich as how many screwball comedies of the 1930s were about rich couples somehow divorcing and acting badly. (Yes they always end up together again.) 1950s movies are full of well to do executive males having affairs on the side. How many jokes on Laugh-in were about husbands, wives and the secretary? And if people talk about how moral people used to be, remember how much alcohol consumption used to be. I suspect a lot milleniumals would be surprised about how much Dean Martin used to joke about drinking.

There was a heck of a lot worth rebelling against and rejecting in the mainstream of the sixties. The purported mainstream morality of elders had become revealed, as it so often is to their children, not much more than an empty and pious hypocricy. To be sure, that didn’t offer youth justifiably rebelling much guidance.

I had gotten a raise in the past five years; if i didn’t have to take a pay cut to keep my job; if my wife hadn’t lost her regular job for a contracting job with no benefits, we might have considered having another child.

The problem you face is very simple. Folks can preach all they want about holding the working class to a different standard of behavior, but there is no way to make the working class care what they say.

You can’t hold them to it for the simple reason you cannot hope to enforce it. They don’t care what the other social classes think.

Not only do individuals and families suffer the results of their moral decisions, but so does society as a whole. And so the governments, both state and federal, have to raise and spend inordinate sums to help ameliorate the evils that come from immoral behaviors and the failure of parents to raise thier children as good citizens.

I feel like the role of generational trauma in this transformation has not been explored enough. The ’60′s hedonists who led the culture in this direction were raised by parents who had lived through the Great Depression and World War II, and they were raised by parents who had been urbanized by the industrial revolution and had also lived through World War I. The impermanence of everything had been dramatically demonstrated by this series of events. Why worry about convention or the future when the world could be turned upside down or blown to bits any moment?

I know this is reductionist in the extreme but I just wonder if it plays a role.

Your conclusion is of course right only in a somewhat tautologous way – of course the working class cannot live the hedonistic libertine lifestyles of the rich and decadent because such things cost money and too heavily indulged physically prevent one from making enough of it.

But who has been telling the poor for decades that narcissistic hedonism is the only way to live? (clue: its not those Godless socialist hippies but men in very expensive suits working out of ad agencies and TV studios).

Who benefits from the improvidence of the poor by selling them junk food and guns and loans – and then benefits even more by incarcerating them by the million in privatised prisons?

The Way We Live Now is no accident – vast sums of money and endless political effort is expended to make and keep it the way it is.

Having a baby while in high school is a prospects-killer for anybody, upper-class or lower-class. Being married while having a baby at 16 makes no, and I mean absolutely not a particle, of difference. Teen child-bearing will kill the prospects of any kid. That’s why upper-class families make absolutely sure this doesn’t happen, using all the means at their disposal: sex education, birth control, and abortion. Poorer people either don’t have these means available, or don’t use them, so they have teenage pregnancies which destroy their prospects. Insisting that they need to be married before they have sex does absolutely, positively,not even one little bit of anything to prevent this problem.

Wealthier people can afford a lot of things (including risk) that the poor(er) cannot. Sex is actually one thing that the poor can afford in abundance (it’s free), whereas many luxuries and pleasures which are morally neutral, are often expensive.

Nobody complains, after all, about month-long trips to Paris. But most working-class families cannot afford one (or if they take one, are doubtless forgoing some other more “important” purchase, or else inviting financial ruin by failing to adequately save for a rainy day); should we therefore restrict travel to pricy destinations?

I’d be careful, Rod… this line of argument (that wealth or other social disparities leads to double standards which ought to be rectified by society) can lead to Marxism pretty damn quickly. And at the risk of invoking Godwin’s Extended Law (which includes totalitarian regimes besides the Nazis), one of the defining features of many communist regimes, including the Soviet Union and Maoist China, was a crackdown on personal immorality. All of these regimes were atheist, so there was no concern about upsetting God; pleasures of the flesh were instead denounced as bourgeois. The New Soviet Man, and other icons of propaganda, most certainly kept his pecker in his pants, and likewise didn’t squander money on other pursuits derided as frivolous or wasteful.

Ah: the perils of “trickle-down” hedonism–how dare the lower classes attempt to emulate their betters! Moral bankruptcy is so much more manageable when it’s cushioned by financial solvency, even affluence. First make your pile of money, kids, then indulge your libertine impulses. The rich aren’t different only because they have more money; they also do decadence ever so much better, in part because they get more practice.
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Now, I realize that this is a completely unfair caricature of what Rod Dreher has written. I’m just annoyed that he’s quoting Matt Lewis (whom I haven’t read) quoting Nick Von Hoffman (whom I have read) about how Janis Joplin and Haight-Ashbury destroyed the Rust Belt. Note to Mr. Lewis: you know how a lot of working-class American kids from the Rust Belt actually became drug users back in the Sixties? They got shipped off to Vietnam, watched their buddies die, killed a bunch of peasants, started using drugs, came back home (if they were lucky) and found that their hometown jobs were gone because corporate America was discovering cheaper places to make things.

I don’t know whose “troops” Von Hoffman thought the kids in the Haight were. I don’t know who he thinks was baiting them with sex, drugs, and rock & roll, or using them for what “enormously political” ends. I do know that the Haight degenerated quickly back then, and that much of the Sixties counterculture became in short order a tragic mess. We–by whom I mean, again, “the Sixties counterculture,” including myself–blew it, and we have plenty to answer for. But I’m damned if I’ll accept the notion that we’re also to blame for Rust Belt decline and for Tabitha Rouzzo, whoever she is.

Nobody complains, after all, about month-long trips to Paris. But most working-class families cannot afford one (or if they take one, are doubtless forgoing some other more “important” purchase, or else inviting financial ruin by failing to adequately save for a rainy day); should we therefore restrict travel to pricy destinations?

No, but if your family is financially insecure, you shouldn’t take a month-long trip to Paris, even if you see other people doing it. Why is this such a difficult thing to understand?

I don’t understand either why the practical, materialist argument for working-class people living according to a stricter moral standard is so objectionable. In the eyes of God (I believe), everyone will be judged the same — or, to be precise, the rich will be judged more strictly than the poor (to whom much is given, much will be expected, etc.). But leaving divine justice and eternity out of it, a poor or working-class teenager runs consequential risks that teenagers from well-off families do not.

I am a Christian, and expect my children to live up to a certain moral standard. This is true whether we are rich, poor, or in the middle. But aside from religion, it’s just good sense. I have middle-class friends whose daughters became pregnant without a husband, and who have faced very serious obstacles as single moms. They are fortunate to have extended support systems. Many poor and working-class people don’t have that. Life is unfair.

““A generation and a half before, you could back a dump truck full of cocaine into a Jesuit schoolyard and none of those boys would get near it.”

“Rubbish. Rubbish. Rubbish.”

I don’t know about Jesuit schoolboys a generation and a half back from the hippies, but I had first hand testimony from my long-gone father about American sailors of that period.
When the navy shipped him out to China-the “Yangtze Patrol”-in the early ’30s, drugs, presumably mainly opium, were widely available, but not a single sailor ever touched the stuff. Alcohol was universally their “drug of choice”. Indeed, many of my dad’s shipmates, including the officers, had gotten themselves transferred over there during Prohibition precisely so they could drink. He never understood the appeal of drugs.

I suspect a lot milleniumals would be surprised about how much Dean Martin used to joke about drinking.

I used to watch the early seasons of Saturday Night Live (with the original cast) when I was in high school. I came across some episodes not long ago, and I was astonished at the amount of drug- and sex-related humor in which SNL indulged in the late 70s, which I either had not noticed when I was younger or hadn’t given a second thought to and had forgotten about.

In many ways, I think we mostly agree–I was reacting to the suggestion (which you may not be making) that if the poor cannot “afford” to do it, neither should anyone else.

That said, there are many ways to mitigate the effects of bad choices, particularly on the poor. Some conservatives have been agitating recently (albeit ineffectively, as politicians who did so tended to get clobbered last month, unless they represented very safe districts) that these things (in particular, birth control) ought to be made unavailable, on the grounds that they encourage unsafe (or immoral) behavior. HPV vaccinations are another example of something which reduces the risk of non-monogamous sex (including for people who are themselves monogamous, even if their partners are not), but which have drawn the ire of some religious conservatives, who allege that they promote licentiousness.

(Some would include abortion as an example of this, too. I won’t, as it involves far more significant moral issues that transcend the fact that copulation is involved).

Leaving morality out of it, this sort of argument strikes me as similar to the suggestion that seatbelts ought to be banned–as they encourage unsafe driving. The analogy isn’t perfect, of course, but for many it seems that stopping non-marital sex itself is more important than stopping the undesirable consequences thereof.

Thus, the question (for all): Are you primarily concerned with the practical consequences of libertine behavior, particularly in the demographic cohorts where these consequences can be severe? Or are you concerned with the behavior itself, as something that is per se immoral, even if things like unplanned pregnancies or STDs or addition or DUI can be satisfactorily mitigated? The fact that we are discussing different economic classes to begin with suggests the former–God not caring much if you are rich or poor–but all too frequently the solutions that are proposed seem to suggest the latter; and that the dangers involved in certain behaviors are seen as a feature and not a bug.

The rust belt began to rust when the major industries shut down and laid everyone off. Drug use went sky high. Drug use also multiplied in black communities after the blue collar jobs that sustained stable families were closed out.

It’s interesting that you post this, right after the post on gun control.

I’d suggest that many urban, Northeastern liberals see sexual morality in something like the same way you might see hunting, target shooting and gun collecting. In both cases, you have a hobby that can be fun and healthy in moderation when carried out by responsible people, but when pursued by less responsible or less conscientious people, can end up disastrously. (Though there are, of course, a ton of differences- teen pregnancy isn’t nearly the same kind of disaster as a murder or suicide involving a gun).

In both cases, I think, similar questions are raised. How many restrictions should be placed on how responsible, conscientious people like you, are able to buy and use guns, in order that teenagers in inner city Baltimore or rural Kentucky, with less capacity for self-restraint and responsibility, less education and cognitive capacity, dysfunctional homes and support networks, and easy access to drugs, don’t end up shooting each other? And similarly, how many restrictions should middle- or upper-middle class teenagers and college students place on their sexual behaviour, so that they don’t end up serving as a bad example to those same aforementioned teenagers in Baltimore and Kentucky.

“A teenage girl in Mississippi is four times more likely to give birth than a teenage girl in New Hampshire”

And a teenage ‘Latina’ in California is four and a half times as likely as a teenage white girl in the Golden State to give birth — at least as of 2008. In fact, teenage Latina girls in California that year had a higher birthrate than white girls in any state. From memory, it was 66 per 1000 for California Latinas versus 54/1000 for crackers from Kentucky.

And you know what …that’s good for the ‘Latino’ community — numbers equal power, as we’ve been hearing since the last election.

Exploration of differing birthrates between whites and Latinos in California isn’t necessarily a bad idea; I suspect that many of the factors that lead to higher pregnancy rates in poor/rural white communities (including less knowledge of, access to, or willingness to use birth control) might apply here as well. (Many Latinos are Roman Catholics who take Church teachings on contraceptives a bit more seriously than many of their white brethren).

But you, M_young, seem eager to explore none of that–no, it’s all about a breeding program designed to win elections, right?

I actually thought Lewis’s article was rather rambling and unfocused. He starts out talking about the article about Tabitha Rouzzo and the elite denigration of “flyover” country, then cites the Vanity Fair article as if to vaguely blame it all on the 60′s, then talks about how upper-class kids are more insulated from stupid behavior than working-class kids, then rambles on about the economic straits in which working-class people find themselves, and ends by mentioning (in a remarkable passage that’s has only a tenuous logical relationship to the rest of the article) how Ben Hogan’s father committed suicide (he doesn’t give the date, but it was in 1922). I mean, aside from saying, “Things are bad for the working class because they’re behaving badly, but the economy stinks, too,” he doesn’t seem to be making any particular point or going anywhere with the article.

As far as Von Hoffman as quoted in the Vanity Fair piece, with his talk of “tactics” and “troops” and “enormously political ends” seems to be spouting conspiracy theories. The section about him comes near the end of the article and seems to contrast his view with what was actually happening, but in any case, Von Hoffman seems to be implying some sinister conspiracy afoot in the whole counterculture, which seems a bit hysterical to me.

I do think that something massively happened to society, but I don’t think anyone really understands just what even now. Certainly, love and flower power were rather naive, and it’s not surprising that the counterculture largely crashed and burned. On the other hand, lots of good things did come out of the 60′s–would most of us really want to go back to a pre-Civil Rights, pre-feminist world? In any case, my contention is that something was bubbling under the surface for decades before that decade, otherwise it wouldn’t have had the effect it did.

If the culture had been so monumentally stable, so firm, so well-functioning, and so morally correct, it’s hard to see how such radical changes occurred so rapidly and easily. Really, a lot of the stereotypes of the 60′s–loose morals, sexual liberation, etc.–were applied to the 20′s; the Depression put the kibosh on that. In the 30′s and 40′s film noir arises as a genre and portrays the seamy side of supposedly “nice” society; and the Beatniks were the immediate predecessors of the hippies. Thus, I think there were many, many things going on for a long time, and that blaming the hippies for the fall of the Rust Belt is pretty much absurd.

Anyway, if the thesis is that the working class is destroying itself by loose morals and needs to have its morals renewed, I ask what I always ask on these threads: How is that to be accomplished (short of totalitarian means, as Scotty points out at 2:40)?

Hector’s posts are rather insightful on this, and are in my view food for thought.

I’d end by pretty much agreeing with Scotty’s later post, which to me sums it all up, my emphasis: Are you primarily concerned with the practical consequences of libertine behavior, particularly in the demographic cohorts where these consequences can be severe? Or are you concerned with the behavior itself, as something that is per se immoral, even if things like unplanned pregnancies or STDs or addition or DUI can be satisfactorily mitigated? The fact that we are discussing different economic classes to begin with suggests the former–God not caring much if you are rich or poor–but all too frequently the solutions that are proposed seem to suggest the latter; and that the dangers involved in certain behaviors are seen as a feature and not a bug.

In short, moralizing and finger-wagging, aside from making the moralizer feel better, seems pretty much ineffective. I agree that the working class–and people in general–need to get off drugs, go back to stable marriages, etc., but how does anyone suggest that this be done? And is mitigation allowed even if it rubs moralists the wrong way?

I came of age in the 60′s and feel I still haven’t recovered from the misconceptions we propagated. And this is not because I concur with the multitude of myopic (thank you Jenkins) assertions that are being made here about past history, about which I rather agree with Dan Davis; “Rubbish. Rubbish. Rubbish.”

However, in my opinion, one idea that turned out to be quite misguided was the notion that class should not matter in one’s choice of a mate. My observation has been, since then, that when a person with more power marries a person with less power, the weaker person typically loses ground over time. I’m not just talking about money, I mean also, differences in personal charisma, and social standing and access. Often, the person with less does not realize that they are standing under the umbrella of the person with more. Should the person with more walk away, which they are more free to do, the person with less is left standing in the rain, because they never developed their own ability to effect change and create stuff.

A tangential comment to the main blog entry I realize. And I largely agree with Cosimano, but probably for different reasons.

Something we need to clear about: we aren’t talking working class people here. Working class people have regular jobs that pay enough to make them worthwhile– that tends to give one structure in life, even if one cuts loose a bit on weekends.
The people we are talking about may have had parents or grandparents who were solidly working class, but they themselves have been forcibly ejected from the class and now are merely poor– working poor, maybe, or welfare poor. And so it should not surprise us to see the same pathologies in them that have marked the underclass for time immemorial.

“But you, M_young, seem eager to explore none of that–no, it’s all about a breeding program designed to win elections, right?”

Of course it isn’t an intentional program. However, the Latino political class is definitely not above flexing their ‘demographic muscle’.

As it happens, it seems that the economy has taken its toll on teen births of all sorts, but especially ‘Latina’ births (of course still far higher than other groups, but declined more as proportion in the last few years.) That says to me that teens know perfectly well how to ‘access’ birth control, but a lot of them want to get pregnant when they have a chance and a reasonable economic outlook.

Being married while having a baby at 16 makes no, and I mean absolutely not a particle, of difference. Teen child-bearing will kill the prospects of any kid.

Of course, this assumes that teen pregnancy is the overarching issue. When one is in their 20s, being married or not makes a great deal of difference, I would think, and I am certain that a culture that promoted legitimacy would help the statistics in this age category.

It reflects a decision among a set of girls to “drop-out” of the economic mainstream; they choose nonmarital motherhood at a young age instead of investing in their own economic progress because they feel they have little chance of advancement.

Of course, one could suggest that with different social mores, this might not be seen as a realistic option. And whether or not this improved their prospects, with them having fewer children the children who do get born would likely be those with better prospects.

Of course, there’s another possibility that Rod is not mentioning, and that is that the upper classes should exercise some noblesse oblige and try to live by the morals that the working class need; at the very least, not flaunt the fact that they are living hedonistically.

This is one case where the real problem is not so much egalitarianism, but the fact that those who can get away with things are too proud of the fact they can and are unwilling to restrain themselves in order not to be a bad example to everyone else.

Six years ago I blogged an idea that suggested that sexual liberation was “institutionally racist” because it wound up being upper classes promoting behavior that only they could get away with.

I remember a boss I used to have asking why conservatives were so worried about loving couples having kids together without being married (his live-in girlfriend, whom he had apparently divorced or left his (ex?) wife for, was pregnant). Why weren’t they concerned more about why so many black people were in prison compared to white people?

I wish I had thought at the time to say “well, maybe because the destruction of the black family is part of why so many blacks are criminals, and maybe the black family was destroyed because too many blacks saw upper middle class white folks promoting having babies with a partner without marriage and said ‘hey, they can work out their own system just fine, so maybe I can too,’ and then found out that doing your own thing only works when you are wealthy and educated enough to handle it.”

If hypocrisy or snobbishness bothers the rich so much that they can’t preach “do as I say, not as I do,” then they had better shape up the way they live, rather than promoting a destructive lifestyle to those who cannot afford it.

There is a mind blowing supply of unskilledlabor and relatively tittle demand for it (And our capitalist system is working very hard to make sure it stays that way). That’s what is driving down wages and leading to all the social pathologies that you see.

PS. before you look down on the poor, realize that the same is true for the middle and upper middle classes, there is also a massive supply of skilled labor and a relatively small demand for it which is why wages for STEM college graduates have been stagnant for the last 30 years…

And I don’t know who said it and I paraphrase:
Black America is the canary in the coal mine, when ever something bad happens, it will happen to them first, but it will happen to you too very soon.

PS. Those two links relate to China, I have no idea how large the supply of unskilled labor is in South Asia, or in Indonesia, but it is undoubtedly in the hundreds of millions.

I’m not really looking down on the poor. I think that all classes need to have a better sexual morality (which I associate with more traditional mores). I just think that lax sexuality effects the poor sooner and more obviously.

As my second comment shows, the rich have a lot to answer for because they do whatever they can get away with rather than restraining themselves to set a good example.

Six years ago I blogged an idea that suggested that sexual liberation was “institutionally racist” because it wound up being upper classes promoting behavior that only they could get away with.

As an economic socialist (albeit politically libertarian), who still recognizes that class struggle is a real and almost natural phenomenon, this notion appeals to me. Blame the ruling class for foisting loose morals on the working class. But its not quite so simple as the bourgeois parasites setting a bad example that is eagerly aped by the Morlocks.

To the extent that sexual promiscuity and single motherhood are particularly prevalent in the African American experience, it did not BEGIN with what white folks think of as the “sexual revolution.” If anything, “white” culture may have caught it from the graphic sexuality of the blues. Nor is it true that Americans of African descent have, en masse, throughout American history, embraced sexual promiscuity. Historically speaking, black Baptists expelled people from the church for it, and there are a plethora of examples of strict, sober, black families, even some in the southern states.

But, on the plantation, both antebellum and post Reconstruction, the largest numbers of the population of African descent were crammed together in remote quarters with little or no police presence, education strictly discouraged, and nobody in any position of authority who cared if the young toughs deflowered the young ladies, or even if any occasional murder took place, as long as a sufficient number of field hands showed up each morning.

After a few generations, that became “normal” for the rural black experience. That culture was still deeply ingrained among the northbound mass migrations, PARTICULARLY the last and largest, which was not people striving for freedom and opportunity, but people no longer needed on the newly automated cotton farms, who were often provided with free Greyhound tickets north by the local White Citizens Council.

Southern “poor white trash” experienced some of the same, but not as intensely. Still, you can find some similar patterns running back many generations. To some extent, none of the gentry much cared WHAT the poor white trash were doing to each other, as long as they showed proper respect to their betters. And of course, not every individual person or family fit neatly into any one of these stereotypical characterizations.

The availability of good paying blue collar jobs sustained a good number of stable families, but the cultural pressure was already there. When the good paying blue collar jobs disappeared, the dam broke.

There was something far deeper and more insidious at work than the bourgeoisie setting a bad example for the working class.

That would barely make a difference. If you want to protect American wages, you need to put up tariffs so that corporations can’t profitably pursue strategies of labor arbitrage.

Even if you somehow managed to freeze immigration and raise tariffs high enough to reduce imports to zero, automation & computerization would continue to immiserate the American working class. The US like most industrialized countries has yet to come to term with the fact that a large proportion of our labor force is redundant.

I’m not really looking down on the poor. I think that all classes need to have a better sexual morality (which I associate with more traditional mores). I just think that lax sexuality effects the poor sooner and more obviously.

The second the pill was invented and women got full access to the labor market, the traditional sexual morality was dead, short of banning the pill and banning women from the workforce there is nothing anyone can do about it.

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” which is all about what leads to success, and he cites many studies done on how middle and upper middle class parenting is what makes the difference in these sorts of outcomes.

THe problem with the lower classes and these sorts of pitfalls isn’t that they “can’t afford to make the same moral lapses”, it’s that they don’t know how to do them right. We discussed this in an earlier thread on single-parenting, on how the more elite parents teach their kids how to avoid unwed parenthood and inculcate in them the benefits of both marriage and delayed gratification. Lower class parents often don’t do that, and this is the source of the different outcomes.

So this is the kind of thing that can at best only be partially ameliorated by education in the schools. What really matters is what kind of cultural education they get at home. More elite kids get the message that it’s okay to party and have sex and so on, but it’s driven into them by all the ordinary habits of thinking and acting throughout their childhood that they have to take responsibility for themselves, see themselves as entitled and empowered, and design for themselves their own future. Lower class kids are taught that they have little power or control over their destiny, and that life just happens to them. This produces different outcomes regardless of the individual differences.

I heard a good line somewhere recently: there are three kinds of people, those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what just happened. Kids have to be raised to see themselves as the ones who make things happen, not the watchers or the bedazzled. If that happens, then the rest of the social/cultural construct around sexuality and work and family falls into place. If it doesn’t, it just kind of falls apart.

Which is why the erosion of cultural institutions and expectations matters, and the emphasis on the individual as the creator of his own destiny is something of an illusion that only works for those who practice it constantly throughout their lives, beginning in childhood. Individuality is like any skill, as Gladwell points out: it takes a long, long time to get good at, much less master. Successful parenting means teaching kids at an early age to do this. Elites have been doing that for a long time, but the lower classes have been doing the opposite, and relying instead on authority and institutions to keep them in check. As those authorities have been eroded away (often by the spread of elite, individualistic values), the lower classes have been left more and more exposed to the vicissitudes of life, and have been just watching things happen to them, not knowing how to respond, not even knowing what has happened.

If there’s a solution to this, it’s that even the lower classes have to learn how to inculcate and practice elite values. The question is, can they? That’s not entirely clear.

Ah: the perils of “trickle-down” hedonism–how dare the lower classes attempt to emulate their betters!

I know you wrote this as parody, but it’s worth addressing on the facts: the lower classes only emulated one aspect of the elite culture’s lifestyle: the self-indulgent aspects, the bling, the showy “entitlement” attitude, without actually emulating all the hard work and discipline that goes along with it.

It’s more akin to a cargo-cult effort to duplicate certain magical outward aspects of the elite life, as if that will bring about the same results. But what’s not understood, or communicated in pop culture, is that the elite lifestyle is built on a fairly complex technology, just like an airplane. And if you don’t actually know the laws of aerodynamics, your plane is either not going to fly at all, or crash. So the lower classes are not getting a full education in aerodynamics, the lifetime of training necessary to actually build a workable airplane, they are just building half-assed planes that can’t fly like the real thing, because they are missing all the inside moving parts.

What they need is honesty about how much time and effort it really takes to create these elite lifestyles. Even seemingly “magical” tickets to the elite life like rock stardom or professional athleticism is built on a tremendous amount of hard work and boring discipline.

When you look at someone like Oprah in this context, you can begin to see why she’s so popular. Her basic schtick is about getting people to see the nuts and bolts that a successful life is built from, and learning to duplicate that. She’s the prophet of middle and lower class aspiration to the elite life. MTD isn’t the real message. Individualism as a lifelong technology for all to use is what she’s selling.